Wall Street's Think Tank: The Council on Foreign Relations and the Empire of Neoliberal Geopolitics, 1976-2014

Noam Chomsky said at one point that "There's a reason nobody studies history. It just teaches you too much." That is certainly true of Wall Street's Think Tank. Bypassing the academic doubletalk and obfuscation of other scholarly histories which are meant to give the impression that world affairs too complicated for the average person to understand, Laurence Shoup takes a very simple and commonsensical approach to studying US economic and foreign policy: simply reading the documents of the people who plan it. And the result of this is, indeed, a book that teaches you too much.His principal object of study is the Council on Foreign Relations, a policy think tank which unites the most powerful members of the US capitalist class with the US academic and political class which serves them. There are lots of conspiracy theories about the Council on Foreign Relations for just this reason, and I want to assure you that this book is not a conspiracy theory; it does not present the Council as some kind of dark puppetmaster. Shoup explains that rather than imposing policies themselves, the Council on Foreign Relations "helps unite the capitalist class community, making it not just a class in itself, but a class for itself." In this way, the Council articulates the interests of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the country, and so sets the agenda for US politics and economics. The capitalist class works with the professional/political class to plan strategies for maintaining and expanding the economic and geopolitical power of US, which is no more a conspiracy theory than saying that the board of Apple Computers meets to determine how to increase profits and market share. Shoup's account of history is carefully documented and clear-sighted, since he has all of the planning documents from the Council on Foreign Relations to back him up. If you are interested in why history in the twentieth century took the course that it did, Shoup shows that you can find a lot of the answers just by reading the documents of the powerful people who planned it. And all of the documents he cites are freely open to the public. This is all going on in plain sight--you just have to look at it.I decided to write this review since I found the book so valuable and saw that only one other person had reviewed it so far. This is an important work of historical precision and clarity, and it deserves serious attention. Wall Street's Think Tank covers the period from 1976 to 2014, so I highly recommend you also check out Imperial Brain Trust by Shoup and a co-author, which covers the period from the 1940's until the late 1970's and examines US strategy for ensuring its supremacy on the global stage after WWII. Both books provide a broad overview of the 20th century, but those are the two main areas of focus.

I agree with Mr. Rowsdower's review that Laurence Shoup's book is "an important work" and "deserves serious attention." Shoup's detailed investigation enables him to "name names," and the reader can easily conclude that the most important names are those of the Anglo-Zionist elite. I would have rated the book a 5 star rating, except that Shoup fails to draw the obvious connection with AIPAC.

A nice little black book for knowing who's connected to whom. Whether you agree with the neo-liberal movement or not. Packed with info.

This a very important book that more Americans should read.

I believe this book should be required reading for all citizen's.....

Laurence Shoup's fabulously revealing new work on the centrality of the CFR (and its related think tanks, global corporations, and UHNWI's Ultra High Net Worth Individuals, provides not only a great portion of the answer to the issue of 'who runs the Empire?', but I find it a complete and comprehensive answer to the many on leftish, progressive-lite, and supposedly alt-media web sites who incessantly ask me to define the actual core of the ruling-elite Disguised Global Capitalist EMPIRE, which I focus almost exclusively on diagnosing, 'exposing', publicly 'calling-out', and pushing quasi-progressive politicians (like Bernie Sanders) to confront by firing a loud, but non-violent "Shout heard round the world" in order to ignite an essential "Political Revolution against Empire" as our forefathers had the brains and guts to do within only a decade of the British Empire becoming the singular dominant Empire in North America oppressing and tyrannizing its colonial colonial 'subjects'.As an aside to the author's research I would just like to suggest that the unnamed "Naval War College professor" who he names as being within the "23 member planning group to formulate the U.S. war aims and the political and economic rules for a post-war Iraq" was most probably Thomas Barnett, author of the 2004 strategy and book, "The Pentagon's New Map" ---- which could have more accurately been titled, "The Global Empire's New Map".The other consideration that Shoup's excellent review of L Paul Bremer's installation in "Occupied" Iraq caused me for the first time to compare this more modern, dual-party, and disguised Empire to the installation of Marshall Petain by the Nazi Empire in France (1940) as being prescience of the type of Rel 2.0 Vichy facade of the rougher-talking neocon 'R' Vichy Party and the smoothe-lying neoliberal-con 'D' Vichy Party that the Disguised Global Capitalist EMPIRE so effectively employs more discretely today.Additionally, Shoup's brilliant work is complimentary to and enhances the recent diagnosis of Empire revealed by an increasing number of books from; Morris Berman's "Dark Ages America, The Final Phase of Empire", Pepe Escobar's "Empire of Chaos", Chris Hedges's "Empire of Illusion", William Robinson's "Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity", Michael Glennon's "National Security and the Double Government", Henry Giroux's "America at War with Itself", and all the works of Chalmers Johnson, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky, et al. to more fully diagnose the unique nature of this last and most complex Empire ever as being both the first fully disguised, and first truly global Empire:"The U.S. state is a key point of condensation for pressures from dominant groups around the world to resolve problems of global capitalism and to secure the legitimacy of the system overall. In this regard, “U.S.” imperialism refers to the use by transnational elites of the U.S. state apparatus to continue to attempt to expand, defend, and stabilize the global capitalist system. We are witness less to a “U.S.” imperialism per se than to a global capitalist imperialism. We face an EMPIRE OF GLOBAL CAPITAL, headquartered, for evident historical reasons, in Washington." [Caps substituted for italics in the original]Robinson, William I. (2014-07-31). Global Capitalism and the Crisis of Humanity (p. 122). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Excellent book. Scholars should follow Shoup's example and write less about the tensions between the two major parties and more about the repression of the ruling class.